


The Polyglot

by TransparentSheepDeer



Category: Devilman (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Albinism, Angst, Asuka Ryo-centric, Canon: Devilman Crybaby, Child Neglect, Coming of Age, Gen, Immigration & Emigration, Japan, Languages, Loneliness, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Peru, References to Depression, USA, mild body horror, ryo from childhood to canon age story because I love those
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-07-09 06:35:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19883233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TransparentSheepDeer/pseuds/TransparentSheepDeer
Summary: All his life, Ryo could never figure out how to fit in with the people around him.Instead, he drowns himself in his studies.But is it enough?





	1. Chapter 1

The first thing he learns is that he is different.

Everyone can walk freely in the forest, but they make him stay in the shadows. He doesn't want them to, he doesn't understand why he can't go and chase after the other kids. Once, when they are not looking close enough, he escapes, and threads through unfamiliar territory.

He stays in the sun on purpose. It's warm - so, so warm. It's already too warm in the forest, but he doesn't mind overheating; he savors his victory, sits down on a sunny spot, closes his eyes, and feels how the warmth shifts on his face as the wind shakes the trees, covering and uncovering his face with their shadows.

He doesn't know how much time passes. It must be very long, because the ground beneath him cools, the sun vanishes. He stands up and rubs on his cold limbs, then looks for the way back.

Except he can't find it.

The realization fills him with fear, and he can't move. Where should he go? Left- no, right. Straight ahead? He is going in circles around himself, heart pounding painfully, but he can't find the way. Nothing is familiar.

Something changes, and he is surrounded by light. His feet don't touch the ground anymore - the wind caresses his skin. But then it starts to poke, and eventually turns into spikes piercing his skin, and he realizes he is moving _in the air._

He is scared, but there is nothing he can do to stop it. He shuts his eyes and begs to be at home again.

How his wish comes true, he doesn't know - but next thing he knows, it's morning again, and he is in his bed.

Someone is next to him. It's his mother. When she notices he is awake, she stands up and gets something from the other side of their shelter.

He notices now that he is hurt. His arms feel sore, his face burns, everything hurts, he can't move.

His mother approaches him, she has flowers in her hand. They are yellow, their shape oval. She squeezes them, lifts his face by the chin, and covers him in the liquid. It stinks, but it relieves the pain a little, so he allows it. 

When she is done, she tells him not to do this again. He nods, although he doesn't completely understand.

He spends the day in bed, healing, tossing and turning.

At night, he hears strange sounds. They sound like screams. There are pops and wet sounds.

He looks out his shelter, and sees chaos. People are on the ground, but they are not moving. Others are running around, weapons in their hands.

A pair of feet stop in front of him, and he looks up. It’s his mother, and something is wrong.

She falls to her knees and screams. It’s loud, and he flinches, covering his ears.

He can’t tear his gaze away as her body twists and turns and doubles in size, until it doesn’t resemble her body anymore, but different shapes he has only seen in animals – stripes, fangs, claws.

He doesn’t know what is happening, but his heart is thumping in his chest and he shuts his eyes and crawls back to his bed. He still hears the screams in the background, sounds of their bodies transforming, bones splitting, skin tearing, blood splashing on the ground.

He pretends they aren’t there. His hands cover his ears so hard that it hurts, his hands hurt, his ears hurt, his chest hurts, everything hurts, but he is so scared that he can’t move.

At some point, the screams die down, and he falls asleep.

Starting the next day, something is different. No – something is _wrong_.

There are blood splashes on the ground, but no one seems to notice it. In fact, everyone is acting strangely.

From then on, they separate him, and they present seeds in their palms, and ask him to make it grow. He points at the seeds and does what they ask, but he is confused. Why don't _they_ do it?

It looks they are trying to prove something to him, but he doesn’t understand any of it. He knows they expect something from him, but they don’t tell him what it is, and whenever he fails, they mutter something about memories.

This goes on for so long that he forgets about the time when things weren't like this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised myself to only post my finished drafts, AND to post them once weekly to spread them out, and here I am, with no self-control whatsoever, posting the first chapter of this, despite it not being finished, and my last work being published barely 3 days ago.
> 
> also this started out as a one-shot but then ??? happened so it's longer.
> 
> anyway thank you for reading, and if you liked it, please let me know!!!


	2. Chapter 2

Something happened, and he is floating, floating, floating. Not in the air this time though.

At some point he lands, and there is solid ground beneath his feet again. Not that they take him too far - his form slouches forward, and moments after he feels grass beneath his toes, he collapses and stops moving.

The darkness that follows is comforting and safe. He doesn't want to move anymore.

Of course, that's too much to ask for. Someone is approaching him - he wakes to the sound of footsteps.

He looks up, but everything is spinning. His tongue is glued to the bottom of his mouth, his lips are so chapped that he winces when they touch.

He makes himself look up, and he notices a hand in front of him.

“大丈夫?” the hand asks.

He doesn't understand it. But the voice is soft and young, and he has a feeling it doesn't want to hurt him.

With a trembling hand, he reaches out to touch back - but he is so disoriented that he misses it.

The hand grabs onto his, and he finally sees who it belongs to; a boy with unfamiliar features.

He looks back with his mouth open, and the boy falls to his knees, gets closer. He would pull away, but he is too tired to do so.

The boy wraps his arms around his neck and pulls him into a suffocating hug, and he says something again.

The boy is warm, and he is so cold. He finds he doesn't even want to move away anymore.

The boy takes him home to his parents. He doesn't understand anything they say, even though he tries to. Nothing they say resembles anything he has heard before.

But it doesn't take him long before he starts picking up words, then phrases, then sentences, and soon he doesn't just understand what they are saying, but he can talk back too.

He gets a name too - Ryo. The boy's name is Akira, his parents are Mom and Dad.

Akira and he play together every day. Something is different about Akira, but Ryo can't put his finger on it. He notices that before they're allowed outside, Mom smears his arms and face with a white cream, but not Akira's. She also makes him wait a little afterwards, and even though she explains that the cream will protect him, he doesn't understand why Akira doesn't get the same treatment.

The parents also take him to weird places, where he gets asked weird questions he doesn't know the answers to. Where did you come from? Where are your parents? How did you get here? 

He can never answer, and it makes them unhappy and angry.

When they go home after that, the parents promise him that he will get back to where he had come from, but Ryo doesn't understand.

He doesn't want to go away.


	3. Chapter 3

Someone comes and takes him away. Akira cries, and Ryo is confused.

The woman they called her mother told him to call her Jenny. She looks wrong, somehow, but Ryo has been taught not to point such things out, because it was rude.

Jenny is different from Mom and Dad. When Ryo falls asleep on the couch, he wakes up in the same place. She doesn't put cream on his skin when he goes out. When Ryo asks her to read him to sleep, she ignores it and tells him to try falling asleep on his own.

Everyone speaks a different language again, and Ryo feels betrayed. He already learned one before, why does he need another one?! But he has no choice, and after a while, he doesn’t mind so much. Moreover, he enjoys figuring out the patterns in this language, even though most of them don’t make sense.

Strangely, Jenny doesn’t take him to kindergarten. He finds that he doesn’t mind it, though – she lets him stay at home and makes him read books, and to Ryo, it feels like a dream come true. Spending the entire day studying and learning new things, without anyone screaming in the background, and no teachers trying to get him to get him to engage with the others, despite that the other kids obviously hate him. He is left alone, and he likes it.

The happiness fades over time. After a while, it becomes impossible for him to keep track of time, and he can’t tell how long the studying has been going on, if he started in summer or winter and he doesn’t remember the last time he has been outside.

He wants to stop, but he is scared to tell Jenny. Every day, she tells him that this will be the foundation of his future, that he exceeds everyone.

So he keeps it up and doesn’t say anything.


	4. Chapter 4

Jenny asks him to get a language certificate in Spanish, and now he is sitting outside, fiddling with his hands nervously. Jenny notices, and tells him to stop - he has to look confident.

Ryo _is_ confident. His teacher has told him several times that his skills were more than good, that he had a natural talent. Ryo didn't doubt himself.

What makes him nervous are the others. They are older than him, and none of them smile, and Ryo is sure that there is something he is doing wrong, and that's why they talk to each other, but not to him.

He already nailed the written part of the exam. This is the last thing he needs to get done, and then Jenny will leave him alone.

It's his turn in ten minutes, and the conversation about outdoor activities goes smoothly until he gets asked a question he hasn't prepared for.

“Do you go hiking with your friends too?”

Ryo gapes at the woman for too long, and she concludes that he didn't understand the question. She tells him that the examination was over, and that he could leave.

Ryo does so, but he doesn't feel accomplished. Everything, he did everything, he knew all the answers, but then she went ahead and asked _this._

He understood the question, of course. What had thrown him off course was the realization that he didn't have anyone he called a friend. His Spanish teacher did tell him multiple times to just lie during the examination because they only cared about his ability to speak, but his brain just short circuited and let him down.

Akira counts as a friend, it occurs to him when he gets home. But he is not here. And he won't ever be, because both coming here and going there is too expensive.

Ryo misses him. He wants to go to bed and sulk, but Jenny stops him.

Ryo thinks at first she might praise him for today, but the praise doesn't come. Instead, she tells him about the next thing he was going to learn.


	5. Chapter 5

It's midnight on the last day of finals, and he wakes up in a cold sweat. He gets out of the bed rapidly, stumbles down the stairs, and tries to remember what subject he had forgotten to study for as he grabs random books from the table.

He is about to open the first one when he remembers that the week was over, he passed all his finals, there was nothing left for him to learn.

Ryo's eyes are heavy and sore. He stares at the book in his hand, and he wants to...

The thought vanishes as soon as it came, and there is nothing he can do to make it come back. 

He gets on the couch and sleeps again.

He wakes up at three PM with a sore back and neck. He doesn't get up the entire day, he tosses and turns on the couch, drifting in and out of a deep slumber.

He wakes up at two AM with sweat covering his...

...it's not sweat.

Ryo blinks, and this time the tears go down a different route on his cheeks. He touches it weakly, and though he can't see it in the dark, he knows his fingers are covered in a transparent fluid.

He vaguely remembers having a dream. There was someone else in it, someone important, and they were... what were they doing? Ryo frowns to himself and tries to remember.

Akira. He dreamed about being a child, and playing with Akira. No, not a child, he was a teen. Or was he? He can't remember.

Ryo flops back onto the couch and tries to forget it. Forget how good it was to have Akira with him. Forget that he hasn't talked to him in the last two months because he was barely functioning.

A thought emerges, slowly, tentatively. What if he went to Japan again? He could see Akira. 

He _wants_ to see Akira.

And now that he finally had his goddamn PhD, there is nothing left that can stop him.

The thought of seeing him again shouldn't be so comforting. It shouldn't be. But he doesn't complain about the relief that overcomes him and finally lulls him to sleep. 


	6. Chapter 6

Jenny doesn't let him go through with it. Not right away at least. She urges him to start building his career. She promises him that he can visit Akira later too.

Ryo goes along with it, and it takes him too long to realize that he is only sixteen, and that he has his whole goddamn life ahead of him for his career.

But he already agreed to go to Peru with Fikira by then. He can't go back on it now.

In the end, this is what makes him see Akira again.

Akira asks so many questions. But not about the demons. He asks things like, why do you wear a coat in summer? Can I meet your friends from the US? Why did you have to get a PhD by 16?

Ryo doesn't answer to any of them. He talks so much about those things, and for once, _just once_ , he wants to stop thinking about it.

Except he realizes that he doesn't know what else there is to talk about.

To Akira, all of these things are a given. Friends, free time. He expects Ryo to act the same, but he can't. He can't, he just _can't_. 

He spent so much time learning and stressing over learning that every other aspect of life has passed him by, and now he doesn't have the time to catch up anymore.

There is no way to fix his complete lack of social skills at this age.

He can learn as many things as he wants, but it will never make up for his childhood. 


End file.
